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The Ontological Spin

by David Bond and Lucas Bessire

Commentary is a forum for responses, elaborations, and reflections on material published in Cultural Anthropology. The journal editors welcome submissions of short manuscripts (1000 words or less) for consideration. Send your manuscripts to ea@culanth.org.

In the second Commentary essay, Lucas Bessire and David Bond respond to the Theorizing the Contemporary series, "The Politics of Ontology," edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen.

The Ontological Spin

The latest salvation of anthropology, we are told, lies in the so-called ontological turn. By all accounts, it is a powerful vision (Sahlins 2013). The ontological turn is exciting in two ways: First, it offers a way to synthesize and valorize the discipline’s fractured post-humanist avant-garde (Descola 2013; Kohn 2013). Second, it shifts the progressive orientation in anthropology from the critique of present problems to the building of better futures (Latour 2013; Holbraad, Pederson, and Viveiros de Castro 2014; cf. White 2013). In both, the turn to ontology suggests that the work of anthropology has really just begun.

At the risk of oversimplifying a diverse body of research, here we ask how the ontological turn works as a problematic form of speculative futurism. While the symmetrical future it conjures up is smart, the turbulent present it holds at bay is something we would still like to know more about. Our skepticism derives from our respective fieldwork on the co-creation of indigenous alterity and on how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized. In both of these sites, we have documented dynamics that elude and unsettle the ontological script. Much, we would argue, is missed. We are troubled at how ontological anthropology defers thorny questions of historical specificity, the social afterlives of anthropological knowledge, and the kinds of difference that are allowed to matter. We are also concerned by the ultimate habitability of the worlds it conjures. Or consider nature and culture. In many places today, nature and culture matter not as the crumbling bastions of a modern cosmology (e.g., Latour 2002; Blaser 2009) but as hardening matrices for sorting out what forms of life must be defended from present contingencies and what must be set adrift. That is, nature and culture matter not as flawed epistemologies but as dispersed political technologies.

Ontological anthropology is fundamentally a story about the Amazonian primitive. It rests on the recent discovery of a non-modern “multinaturalist” ontology within indigenous myths (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Yet, as Terry Turner (2009) shows, the figure of this “Amerindian cosmology” is based on ethnographic misrepresentation. Kayapó myths, for instance, do not collapse nature/culture divides. Rather, the “whole point” is to describe how animals and humans became fully differentiated from one another, with one key twist: humanity is defined not as a collection of traits but as the capacity to objectify the process of objectification itself. In such ways, the attribution of this hyper-real cosmology paradoxically reifies the very terms of the nature/culture binary it is invoked to disprove.

At the very least, this means that ontological anthropology cannot account for those actually existing forms of indigenous worlding that mimetically engage modern binaries as meaningful coordinates for self-fashioning (Taussig 1987; Abercrombie 1998). This is certainly true in the case of recently-contacted Ayoreo-speaking peoples in the Gran Chaco. Ayoreo projects of becoming are not a cosmology against the state, but a set of moral responses to the nonsensical contexts of colonial violence, soul-collecting missionaries, radio sound, humanitarian NGOs, neoliberal economic policies, and rampant ecological devastation (Bessire 2014). Only by erasing these conditions could a “non-interiorizable” multinaturalist exteriority be identified. Doesn’t this suggest that ontological anthropology is predicated on homogenizing and standardizing the very multiplicity it claims to decolonize? What does it mean if ontological anthropology, in its eagerness to avoid the overdetermined dualism of nature/culture, reifies the most modern binary of all: the radical incommensurability of modern and non-modern worlds?

Charged with getting nature wrong, modernity is rejected out of hand in the ontological turn. While the West mistook Nature for an underlying architecture, indigenous people have long realized a more fundamental truth: the natural world is legion and lively. Yet this supposed distinction between modernity (mononaturalism) and the rest (multinaturalism) seems strangely illiterate of more nuanced accounts of the natural world within capitalist modernity (Williams 1980; Mintz 1986; Mitchell 2002). Attributing the pacification of nature’s vitality to the modern episteme neglects how colonial plantations, industrial farms and factories, national environmental policies, biotechnology companies, and disaster response teams have attempted, in creative and coercive ways, to manage the dispersed agencies of the natural world. The easy dismissal of modernity as mononaturalism disregards the long list of ways that particular format never really mattered in the more consequential makings of our present.

It is all the more ironic, then, that ontological anthropology uses climate change to spur a conversion away from the epistemic cage of modernity. We would do well to remember that, in the most concrete sense, modernity did not disrupt our planet’s climate, hydrocarbons did. Such fixation on modernity misses the far more complicated and consequential materiality of fossil fuels (Bond 2013). In the momentum they enable and in the toxicity they enact, hydrocarbons naturalize differences in new ways. Such petro-effects amplify existing fault lines not only in industrial cities but also in the premier fieldsites of ontological anthropology: the supposedly pristine hinterlands. In the boreal forests of the northern Alberta or in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin or in the snowy expanses of the arctic or in the dusty forests of the Gran Chaco, the many afterlives of hydrocarbons are giving rise to contorted landscapes, cancerous bodies, and mutated ecologies. Such problems form a “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that the spirited naturalism of ontological anthropology cannot register let alone resist.

These observations lead us to formulate the following three theses:

First, the ontological turn replaces an ethnography of the actual with a sociology of the possible.

Second, the ontological turn reifies the wreckage of various histories as the forms of the philosophic present, insofar as it imagines colonial and ethnological legacies as the perfect kind of village for forward thinking philosophy.

In conclusion, we argue that it is misleading to suggest anthropology must choose between the oppressive dreariness of monolithic modernity or the fanciful elisions of the civilization to come. Both options leave us flat-footed and ill-equipped to deal with the conditions of actuality in our troubled present (Fischer 2013; Fortun 2013). Instead, we insist on a shared world of unevenly distributed problems. This is a world of unstable and rotational temporalities, of semiotic and material ruptures, of unruly things falling apart and being reassembled. It is a world composed of potentialities but also contingencies, of becoming but also violence, wherein immanence is never innocent of itself (Biehl 2005; Martin 2009). In this world, we ask how the wholesale retreat to the ideal future may discard the most potent mode of anthropological critique; one resolutely in our present but not necessarily confined to it.

[This is a distilled version of a longer critical essay.]

References

Abercrombie, Tom. 1998. Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J. 2013. “Double-Click: the Fables and Language Games of Latour and Descola; Or, From Humanity as Technological Detour to the Peopling of Technologies.” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 22.

Fortun, Kim. 2013. “From Latour to Late Industrialism.” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 22.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Comments

Posted By
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

March 9th

Bessire and Bond: "Yet, as Terry Turner (2009) shows, the figure of this 'Amerindian cosmology' is based on ethnographic misrepresentation. Kayapó myths, for instance, do not collapse nature/culture divides."

Just a couple of remarks on this passage. (There are sundry more things wrong with the commentary, but let's proceed slowly):

1) This is an argument of authority at the best, and a theoretical solecism at the worst. Turner, the only rabid anti-structuralist I know who nonetheless is a firm believer in the Nature/Culture divide (as defined by Lévi-Strauss, of all people) as a human universal, thinks the Kayapó must be a truer example (the 'for instance' in the passage above is a bald-faced instance of argumentative hypocrisy) of Amerindian cosmologiES than the other many hundreds ethnographic examples that are at hand in any good library of the world. Just go and check them out. And by the bye, Turner is completely wrong about the Kayapó as well. He thinks that they do have one "ontology", namely, his own, namely, what passes for him as Marxist philosophy. To each person his or her faith.

2) When we (Tania Lima and I) developed the concept of "Amerindian perspectivism", did we go and check every known (and unknown, and unknowable, including non-existent ones) monograph on every Ameridian society/culture that has ever lived in the New World? Did we speak with every Amerindian individual about that? No, we did not. Shame on us. Fortunately, rumour has it that Turner has had every living (and dead) Kayapó person telling him all Kayapó myths before concluding that "the Kayapó" do not etc. Looks like the venerable trope called synecdoche lies above the cognitive capacity of my critics.

3) And as a final note, I deeply resent the ~gross misrepresentation~, by the authors of this piece as well as by Turner, of the perspectivist thesis as the "collapsing of nature/culture divides". This is silly.

Posted By
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

March 10th

”Surely, the most fundamental epistemological question posed by ethno- ethnohistory is precisely how the Other is defined as Other. The answer can only be: in contrast to the self. How then does a society defines itself as such? The answer, in pragmatic terms, is: by reproducing itself as a totality. Reproduction (the reflexive production of production) is of course a social process, but it is also a cultural structure (...) consisting of the conceptual forms of (re-)productive activities and the values toward which they are oriented. A society’s representation of itself, then, is constituted of the operations (i.e. culturally represented forms of actions) comprising its process(es) of self- production. It follows that its representation of the relationship to another society should take the form of some transformation of the process(es) of reproduction that form the basis of its representation of itself.” (Terence Turner)

• This is what - the representational spin? The reproductive spin? The totality spin? The conceptual business-as-usual spin? Give me some Ayoreo endorsements to this primitivist babble, please. And, since you're at that, please ask Davi Kopenawa if he is being an Amazonian apolitical primitive, when he speaks about the inner being of the forest and the invisible spirits who are the true essence of the world.

Posted By
Lepetit Agathon

July 30th

So this is the new anthropological debate? Bessire and Bond seem to misunderstand almost everything, and Castro wants to understand nothing but his own fabrications --has he got something to say about the points raised by the piece or is he just dealing with an iconoclast view on the Perspectivist Gospel? Poor old Turner is held hostage in the middle ground of this bizarre struggle. He does not deserve neither Castro’s hysterics nor Bessire and Bond’s clumsy vindication. And then must we be hostages too of this Prehistorical divide between politics and cultural logic? Should we have to choose between a new version of the ivory tower and Avatar formulae? Flogging dead horses (jaguars) all over again… The worse bit is the odd feeling that the discussants are not arguing for the sake of the matter, but deciding who’s to be the new anthropological prima donna. A pity.
Agathon
(PS. “And, since you're at that, please ask Davi Kopenawa if he is being an Amazonian apolitical primitive, when he speaks about the inner being of the forest and the invisible spirits who are the true essence of the world”... Isn’t this an argument of authority too? Looks like the venerable trope called synecdoche lies above the cognitive capacity of some people indeed.)

Posted By
David Bond

August 20th

Our longer essay on Ontological Anthropology, of which this blog post is but a distilled version, has now been published in American Ethnologist (link below to open access).